Branding: Assignment #4 Your tagline: one of the most important ads you’ll ever create

Why do you need a tagline?

For lots of reasons — the best reason is that it functions as shorthand for communicating who you are, what you stand for, and the benefit you offer.

With that in mind, here are a few principles for success:

Keep your ideal customer in mind. In most cases, your tagline is aimed at new prospects who don’t yet know you. The secondary audience is your existing customer base. The important thing is to write the tagline from an external perspective. A tagline is not a company mission statement (more on that below).

Determine what kind of tagline you need. Is it merely a descriptive phrase to clarify what you do? Is it meant to position your organization against competitors? Or maybe the goal is to pose a provocative question that gets your audience thinking.

Let the tagline grow out of your Secret Sauce. A tagline’s goal is to differentiate you from your competition–to compel a prospect to put you on the short list of candidates. Too often taglines of competing companies are so similar that they are indistinguishable to potential customers looking for cues on which one to hire. Make sure your tagline expresses your company’s greatest virtue (look back to your archetype!) or most unique offering. Put some distance between your organization and the rest of the pack.

Don’t confuse a mission statement with a tagline. A mission statement is, by its nature, focused inwardly. A tagline is addressed to outsiders. The mission speaks to how you or your business fulfills your vision — not your Secret Sauce.

Avoid the jargon words of tagline death. These are words that everybody claims, and when added to one another, produce a bland, verbal gruel that no one remembers. These are the buzz-killers that prevent your brand from getting traction with future customers. The top five words to avoid are:

Quality

Service

Commitment

Excellence

Strategic

Smart, busy people like you just gloss over words like that, right? You hear them too many times from too many companies in too many industries. We’ve already established that there’s something YOU do better than anyone else on the planet. What exactly is it? Start there, and then find the most concrete, visceral, creative words to describe it. (Tip: Let nouns and verbs do the heavy lifting in your new tagline, and avoid too many adjectives.)

Types of Taglines

Once committed to the tagline process, the first question to ask is which type of tagline is best for your company. Tagline types can be categorized as follows:

Descriptive: The goal is simply to clarify what your organization does. This can be helpful for a new entrant into its market, or perhaps a company whose name or initials are not self-explanatory. These are especially important if you are using your own name as your business name. Often these descriptive taglines are incorporated into the company logo.

Concept Ownership: A tagline–if well worded and frequently repeated–can enable your company to “own” a word in the customer’s mind. Go to Meeting’s tagline Online Meetings Made Easy is a good example of owning the word “easy.” Every online conference provider can deliver a meeting; but “easy” is a great concept to own, especially with so many non-technical people embracing teleconferencing for the first time. What’s the one word (or short phrase) your company can own?

Differentiating: A tagline that differentiates is one that sets you apart from competitors, promising one core virtue that you can credibly claim above all others. Citibank’s Citi Never Sleepsis a creative differentiator as it suggests that while other banks are asleep, Citibank is wide awake looking out for you. The play on words gives Citibank a sophisticated, metropolitan feel-like New York City, the city that never sleeps.

Anticipatory: The approach here is to paint a picture of the future-of what the customer’s life will be like with you as their vendor/partner/provider. Lending Tree’s When Banks Compete, You Winis a great example of this.

Aspirational: These taglines connect your company to the dreams and goals of your audience. The US Army’s Be All You Can Be is a classic example of this. Regis University’s Learners Becoming Leaders is another good example. It’s short, it uses alliteration, and has a compelling aspirational element: prospective students immediately identify the university as a place to achieve their dreams of making a difference in the world.

How to Create a Great Tagline

The tagline creation process is essentially one of reduction–of taking your company’s “elevator pitch” and reducing it down to one intriguing phrase that differentiates you from everyone else. As with all brand-building efforts, this usually means claiming one thing that you’ll defend at all costs, even if it means leaving some desirable turf to competitors. You simply can’t be everything to everybody.

Generally speaking, the fewer words the better when writing a tagline. Sony’s new taglineMake.Believe gets the job done with just two. It uses a clever play on the word “make-believe” to communicate the company’s ability to deliver technology that enables people to make their own media and also to enjoy realistic, believable home entertainment in high definition. Keep your tagline to 10 words or less.

At the risk of sounding like a grammar nerd, it might be helpful to point out that most taglines will end up in either the indicative, imperative or interrogatory form–a statement, a command or a question. It’s worth examining which form is best for your brand. Indicative statements are best for describing what you do. Imperative commands are a bit bolder–you’re actually telling your audience what to do. Questions like UPS’s What Can Brown Do for You? are for getting people to think, and reconsider their assumptions.

It helps to use words creatively–a play on words or dual meanings have a way of getting people to stop and think. Adidas’ Impossible is Nothing is a great example of a tagline that does both. The reverse of the expected word order is rather curious, creates new meaning and inspires the consumer-athlete to greatness. You can also use your chosen theme as a starting point for finding words that could work here.

When developing a tagline, it is important to differentiate it from a campaign slogan. A tagline usually has a longer shelf life than an advertising campaign. IBM’s Let’s Build a Smarter Planetcampaign is very compelling, and addresses the need for superior technology to solve the world’s problems; but it’s not the ultimate statement or tagline for the technology giant.

Play around with this for awhile and share at least two or three ideas here in a comment below. I’ll give you feedback and add ideas or suggestions.